TESS TOLD HIM to stay on the porch. There was a house out back. She said she didn’t know the people well, but knew their names and whatever she’d picked up from driving around the county. So she went looking for the Olsens.
Max stared down the highway. He could barely see the truck. It was far away.
Max was shivering. He rubbed his arms to warm himself and looked at the artifacts stuck to the wall.
Then he heard it. A howl.
And everything he’d just thought went out the window.
TESS HEARD IT too. The house behind Jeepers Creepers was dark. There was no vehicle in the carport, which surprised her. She knew they had come from Wisconsin in 1984, that they owned a 2009 Ford-350 truck with a matching camper shell and a “Choose Life” license plate on the back bumper (she knew the plate number too, of course). She knew they had an Australian sheepdog named Pearl with one blue eye and one brown. She knew they kept to themselves except for their regular attendance at the Streams of the Desert Pentecostal Church in Paradox. She assumed they did their shopping in one of the suburbs north of Phoenix. She’d been 99-percent certain that the Olsens would be home.
But she was wrong.
The car was gone.
The dog looked out at her through the curtains.
No help here. But they were close to the on-ramp to the freeway, so they could go up there and flag someone down…
Then, the unearthly cry. It wasn’t a wolf. It wasn’t a coyote. It was human, but there was something feral about it too. Like she imagined the damned in hell would sound.
The hairs on the back of her neck rose.
The howling went on and on. It gave her goose bumps.
She looked in the direction of the howl. A light arrowed along the road, then flared. Headlights passed over the store in front. She heard the car slow, stop. The woman? Had the woman been able to start up the truck? It didn’t sound like a big truck, though. She started back around the house and headed for the porch of the antiques/general store.
She heard a car door slam, and the sound of a car accelerating.
She reached the porch.
Max Conroy was gone.
She watched the taillights wink as the car turned onto the on-ramp to the freeway.
Max had hitched himself a ride. Should’ve known he would take off.
The howl again. She looked down the road and saw a figure in the darkness. The figure held something in its arms. As Tess’s eyes adjusted to the light, she saw it was the woman who had chased them. The woman held the boy, lifeless, against her chest. And she howled.
Max had not been lying when he’d told her about the woman and the boy. Tess sensed that if the woman saw her, it would be all over. She could feel the woman’s anger, the hatred. It scared her. Tess had been a cop for a long time. She was very rarely scared, even a little. Adrenaline would come to her aid, and she would act. But the screaming of this woman, and the sight of the woman herself, made Tess want to slink away. To shrink into the shadows and become anonymous.
This was a mother bear who had lost her cub. There was despair, but overriding it was rage. It was palpable in the air, in the rain, and there was a raw edge that seemed to pry into Tess’s internal organs. Danger. High-voltage danger.
And so Tess did slink. She hid. She hid because she could not stand the raw grief of the woman who had killed at least five people.
Tess waited.
The howling stopped.
The rain continued. Incessant, but softer now, whispering.
She heard a truck start up—a big engine. She heard it accelerate. Saw the pinpoint lights coming. Saw the truck flash by, slow, and turn with a squeal of tires onto the on-ramp, headed north.
She’d seen the truck. Only a glimpse, but it was huge, gargantuan. She’d seen the damaged front end. And the light was dim but she thought she saw two figures. One taller, on the driver’s side. And one smallish, slumped against the seat.
The woman and the boy.
The rain lessened. Tess could smell alfalfa hay, creosote bushes, and ozone. It was full dark now. She needed to flag down someone and reach dispatch.
Chapter Thirty-Three
MAX LET THE older couple drive him through Cottonwood as far as the turnoff for Clarkdale. There, he told the man to pull over on the side of the road. He regretted hijacking the car, regretted letting them see the gun stuck in the waistband of his pants. He could see the interview now. “He seemed like a nice enough guy, but then he told me to pull over and turned us out of our own car.”
The couple stood by the side of the road, looking scared. The man was staring at him. “You look familiar. Aren’t you the guy in those movies? The ones with the vampires?” His face lit up and he snapped his fingers. “Max Conroy, that’s it! Lou, it’s Max Conroy.” He turned to Max and said, “Didn’t I read you were staying around here somewhere? I could swear I read something about it. So what is this? Part of a movie? Are we going to be in the final cut?”
Max said, “No, no. I’m not Max Conroy. But I get that a lot.”
The wife looked at her husband, then glanced around the empty parking lot. She touched his arm. “Bob, I don’t see any cameras.”
But Bob shook her hand away. “Are you certain you’re not Max Conroy? You sure look like him…Can I have your autograph? I’ll give you my address and you can let us know where we can pick up the car.”
His wife glared at him as he reached in, rummaged through his glove compartment, and came up with an owner’s manual for the car. “Just put the old John Hancock anywhere,” he said, fishing around for a pen.
Max said, “I’m just his stunt double. We don’t even look that much alike.”
“That’s good too. I never met a stunt double before. What’s Max like?”
“He’s OK. Made some bad choices with women. You know…movie stars.”
The husband said, “Yeah, not a whole lot of brains there, you know? What a way to make a living.”
Max signed the manual, “Best wishes—Dave Finley, stunt double for Max Conroy.”
As he drove away, they stood there in the rain. Both of them waved, although Lou’s wave was less enthusiastic.
Max vowed that when he was done with Gordon, he’d leave the car, a late ’80s Chrysler LeBaron, where they’d find it.
He drove on 260 past the little airport and took 89A toward the mining-turned-tourist town of Jerome. The road laddered up the mountain, full of switchbacks and hairpin turns. The Desert Oasis was on the same road. Jerry had told Max that Gordon had bought the land cheap, since the property prices in the nearby upscale resort town of Sedona were sky-high. A Sedona address was a necessity for a holistic-themed celebrity dry-out center. But apparently, the Verde Valley was close enough.
Mine tailings notwithstanding.
Max was holding it together, but only barely. His clothes were wet and he was shivering in them. The old car’s heater didn’t help much. He thought about Tess McCrae, left in the lurch at Jeepers Creepers, but knew she’d get back on track soon enough. And he had no doubt she’d look for him. But by then he would have concluded his business with Gordon, and Gordon would have fixed him.
Fix him. Did he really believe that?
Max guessed that, given the choice of dying on his Two Red Hills Navajo carpet, Gordon might choose to fix him.
If he could.
The rain had turned to a steady drizzle. It was dark. Max could see the lights up ahead, knew they belonged to the ramshackle houses of Jerome clinging to the mountain.
The Desert Oasis was three or four miles from the first switchback to Jerome, hidden by a stand of aleppo pines and a bushlike tree that grew like a weed around here. Max peered past the slashing windshield wipers, trying to make out pines in the darkness. Gordon had wanted the place to look and feel exclusive, so there was no sign, just a rolling gate behind the pines and a tall fence to keep the inmates inside. The good old DO.